RUSH: The Obama Daily Tracking Poll, down 228 points today — that would be the Dow Jones Industrial Average — another month of over 600,000 people unemployed. 
The Citibank share price, Citigroup is fluttering and it’s around a dollar. It’s been under a dollar at points today. Do you realize that a share of stock in Citibank will cost you less than an ATM fee? I think it’s time we start looking at something very seriously. You probably have heard, ladies and gentlemen, two events here, let’s tie them together. Down at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, the United Auto Workers are having a lavish convention. That’s fine with me. I’m not going to beat up on them, but I am going to point out that there’s a lot of hypocrisy, when the United Auto Workers, who are every bit as affected by this downturn as anybody else, are having a giant convention at a brand-new five-star super-duper resort down in Miami, the Fontainebleau, and by the way, Joe Biden is speaking there today. The press is not allowed, no press allowed for Biden’s statement. I think the teleprompter is broken. No, it’s not that. It’s that Biden’s going to be talking to them about card check.
Obama assured the union guys earlier this week that he’s gonna fast track this. Card check is the legislation that would allow unions to come in and unionize any small business with public voting so they could put pressure on people. It is a way to unionize as many small businesses in the country as possible. Obama’s following through on this. Biden is talking to the UAW guys about it. We have bailed out the UAW twice now in the automobile bailouts, and look what’s happening to Citibank. We have bailed Citibank out. Look at what’s happening to AIG. That’s where all of my insurance is, or much of it, AIG, and they are in huge trouble. We bailed them out. Starting last fall, starting before the election, we have bailed out a number of entities.
I want to ask you a serious question, all of you. Are any of them showing any signs of recovery? I don’t see any that are showing any signs of recovery. In fact, what I see is every entity that we have bailed out getting worse. General Motors, poor old General Motors, they’re now getting serious about bankruptcy here. I mean, they’ve had all these bailouts, they promised to do all this restructuring, and it isn’t mattering. It’s making matters worse. Now, we’ve tried the political solution. We have tried the concept of fascism in a sense here with the government owning, operating, and advising the means of production in the case of the United Auto Workers, General Motors, Chrysler. When the hell are we going to try a business solution to these problems? Do you realize not one business solution has been proposed?
Obama filled in the details yesterday on the $75 billion mortgage bailout. Do you realize even people who took out second loans to build a swimming pool or whatever are going to get bailed out by people who are still struggling to pay their mortgages? It’s not just poor people, and it’s not just the usual crowd that was supposedly lured into a mortgage they couldn’t afford by predatory lenders who are going to be bailed out. It’s people with second mortgages in many instances. So we bailed out the United Auto Workers, and they’re in trouble. We bailed out General Motors, we bailed out Chrysler. What do you think that everybody was bailing out? They’re bailing out employees here. So while General Motors and Chrysler are literally just fighting to stay alive, General Motors is making it plain here, they’re using words like, our ability to operate as an ongoing concern is seriously threatened. Now, we have to allow for the fact that they may be seeking more bailout money and making their situation worse than it may be, but it’s still bad. I don’t care if they’re exaggerating at all, the situation with the auto companies is — in fact, I saw a story today, which I’ve been talking about on this program for a long time, people are spending more to repair their old cars than the old cars cost rather than go out and buy a new car because of the problems associated with getting a loan and the economy being such that this is not a ripe market to buy new cars.
So if you had people spending more money to repair their car than their current car costs or that they could sell it for, if you have United Auto Workers employees partying big time down in Miami at the five-star Fontainebleau, if you have General Motors and Chrysler basically putting out the news that they are on their last legs, isn’t it time, ladies and gentlemen, that we look at the results here of the political solution to all of these problems? Go to any bank that has been bailed out that needed to be. Some didn’t need to be bailed out, but they were anyway, forced to take the money. You can go to Citibank, you can go to Merrill Lynch, you can go to AIG, and you don’t find any of it working, do you? You don’t find any of it working and we’re five months into this. Remember what all this was called — ‘stimulus.’ This was going to stimulate recovery. We’re going to repair the bridge over the Osage River in Missouri, first project from the stimulus package. I don’t see any economic uptick from that announcement and they’re going to do the work.
So we’ve bailed out the auto companies. In the process, we bailed out the United Auto Workers, a political solution. It has failed. General Motors probably going to have to go through a managed reorganization and a real bankruptcy court and have that great company come out a lean, mean car-making machine, one that Americans would eagerly support, especially if the board of directors came out on the other side fighting for their rights in a free-market economy, standing up to government regulations, standing up to taxes, cap and trade, and there’s an editorial in the Detroit News today, cap and trade will destroy, will kill Michigan with high taxes, cap and trade will kill Michigan. It will kill the automobile industry. It will kill what’s left of employment in Michigan. At some point, folks, you have to start asking, ‘Why can’t the wizards of smart see this?’ Well, that’s what I’m getting at, Snerdley. They do see it. But they don’t seem to care one whit about it.
Now, I believe, as I said yesterday, I think if you want to understand President Obama’s economic policies, and furthermore, if you want to understand his philosophy, I think it’s crucial to understand who his mentors were. I think it’s crucial to understand the people that influenced him as a young man and as an adult. I think it is important to find out when he was a young man, young child, who were the influences. We know all of this. It just wasn’t vetted by the Drive-By Media. These things matter. As I said yesterday, if you really want to understand what’s going on here, you can put it in one sentence: Barack Obama believes in policies that will return the nation’s wealth to its, quote, unquote, rightful owners. What does that mean? I believe that Barack Obama has grown up thinking the old canard, believing the old canard, that the wealthy, that the upper middle class, the rich, have all gotten that way by unfairly taking more than their share of the economic pie. They have either stolen it or they have screwed little people to get it, or they have done something that is not legal. They have done something that’s unethical, that nobody should have as much money as some of these people do, except if they’re Democrats, of course.
I really believe he thinks it’s time that the rightful owners of the wealth, the people who have had all this wealth stolen from them and transferred to all these evil rich people, it’s about time they got their money back. And, if you look at his policies, how can you dispute it? He’s gonna tax anything he can on people at $200, $250,000 a year, and he’s going to redistribute it to the people he thinks have been screwed. In the process, what he’s going to do is end up creating the largest welfare state this country has ever known. They’re making a mistake by calling this European socialism. That doesn’t quite cover what’s going on here, because in order to get there, in order to get to a circumstance where this country is like France, or any other western European socialist country, you first have to tear down the greatest economic engine in the history of the free world, in the history of the world, that’s the United States, you have to tear it down, and there are beginning to be a lot of doubters. Jim Cramer, who was an Obama acolyte, CNBC guy, Mad Money, Jim Cramer, he’s having more than second thoughts. It’s really come full circle for him now. He’s never seen such idiotic handling of the economy, he says.
Now, he’s never been on the attack list, either, but here’s another thing. If you look at the wizard of smarts team that Obama put together, his economic team, people are starting to question, ‘Where are you guys?’ Then they realize it’s all academics. It’s all academics and theorists. There’s not one CEO, former CEO, not one person with actual experience in business advising President Obama on any of this. Now, if you want to say, ‘Rush, no, we have to stick with a political solution here in what’s happening to General Motors and Citigroup and other things.’ Okay, if you want to say that, then here’s the political solution today, March the 5th, 2009, get the government out of everybody’s life. That’s the political solution. They’re in everything they can get their hands in right now, they’re in the mortgage business, they’re in the automobile business, they’re in the banking business, get ’em out. Get them out of it. The government is killing American companies; the government is killing United Auto Workers, General Motors, Chrysler. The government is destroying Citigroup. They have no clue what to do.
You cannot throw money at things. This is what is so frustrating. We have thrown money at the poor since the 1930s. We still have the poor. The Democrats and people like Obama get away with throwing the money at them because it’s ‘compassionate.’ We never look at the results. Well, we’re not allowed to look at the results. But you take a gander at any institution you want that has been just thrown a bunch of money, and you’ll find two things: no change in that entity’s basic condition. In fact, it may have worsened, and the people in that entity face more controls and more loss of freedom, ’cause the government’s involved, than they had before the government compassionately came in to break ’em out and sell ’em. So here we have the political solutions from months ago, they haven’t worked, the recipients of this largesse, the good intentions from the government, are in worse trouble than they were before they took the money. It’s time to wake up, folks, realize the Obama way is the way of destruction.
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RUSH: Two minor corrections. It’s the Fontainebleau hotel. I was calling it the Fontain-blow. I had something else on my mind. And the language about General Motors having trouble being an ongoing entity, was not actually what General Motors said. It was their auditors. General Motors auditors have raised substantial doubt. I want to be accurate here, factually correct. But those little rhetorical errors do not disguise and camouflage what’s happening. While the industry that pays them is going down the tubes because of government involvement, the United Auto Workers are throwing this lavish party down at the Fontainebleau with Joe Biden making a speech on card check that the media is not allowed in to cover. At the same time, Citigroup and every other entity that has been bailed out is in worse shape than it was before the bailout.
Citigroup, a share of stock costs less than an ATM fee. The markets are tanking, folks. Over 600,000 people lost jobs again in February. President Obama has done nothing of substance to help the car companies. He is in the process of spending young people — young people, people under 30 and the children they have not had yet; he is spending them — into oblivion. They are broke before they get their first jobs. People are going broke today, and Obama is going to ensure that the children of the 30-year-old crowd today and even their grandchildren will be broke before they get their first jobs. The banking system needs help from grown-ups, not academics, theoreticians, and politicians. The banking system needs some serious help, and while all this is going on, the White House has its chief of staff playing manipulative games with washed-up talking heads targeting me on the taxpayer dime.
This country doesn’t need another administration playing dirty tricks and making enemies lists. I’ll tell you something else. Barack Obama promised an end to all this. And how many of you believed it? There is such a desire among the American people for all the so-called politics as usual to cease, to stop. Republicans versus Democrats. Accusation, accusation, accusation. Personal insults. Obama said there was going to be none of that. He was going to get beyond that. He was going to get above that. It was going to be a new day. The world was going to love us. Well, some parts of the world probably do love us, but they used to be our enemies.
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RUSH: Folks, not to pile on the bad news, but the bad news is the bad news. Reality is reality. From the Bloomberg newswire: ‘FDIC…’ You know what FDIC is, don’t you? Brian, do you know what FDIC is? (interruption) Oh, this is good. (interruption) No, no. (interruption) The… (interruption) Yeah, I know. (interruption) But — but — but — (interruption) I know. (interruption) Yes, but Brian, do you know what it does? Now that you know what FDIC is, do you know what it does? (interruption) Mmm-hmm. All right, all right, that’s good. He didn’t know what the FDIC was, but he knows what it does. This is key. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ensures all of your deposits in the bank up to $100,000. So, the FDIC has a chairman. Her name is Sheila Bair, B-a-i-air.
Do you know what she said yesterday? ‘The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said that the fund it uses to protect your deposits in American banks could dry up in the next six months amid a surge of bank failures. She responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.’ We’ll get to the fees in just a moment. ‘Without these fees, without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year.’ This is in her letter March 2nd to the industry, ‘US community banks plan to flood the FDIC with about 5,000 letters in protest of the fees, according to a trade group.’
All right, now, this is typical of the way liberal Democrats operate. Okay, now we’ve got a whole brand-new crisis. While we’re bailing out the banks, and while we’re doing everything we can to convince everybody that their money is safe (gasp!) Oh, no, the FDIC is going to run out of money in six months and your money may not be safe. Oh, we have a solution: new assessments. Do you want to hear what the assessments are? ‘The FDIC last week approved a one-time emergency fee and other assessment increases on the industry, the banking industry, to rebuild the fund that insures deposits.’ Oh, by the way, deposits are now up to$ 250,000. I forgot. Bush did that before he left office. So the FDIC now insures you up to $250,000.
So the FDIC, in order to prevent its insolvency, approved a one-time, emergency fee and other assessment increases on the banking industry — which will get passed on to you — to rebuild this fund. ‘The fees, opposed by the industry, may generate $27 billion this year after the fund fell to $18.9 billion in the fourth quarter, down from $34.6 billion in the previous period. Smaller banks are outraged over the one-time fee. They say the one-time fee could wipe out 50 to 100% of a bank’s 2009 earnings.’ These fees are not insignificant. Now, as I, your trusted and loyal host, can read the stitches on the fastball — I can read between the lines, I know liberals and liberalism like every square inch of my glorious naked body.
If they can attach a so-called one-time assessment fee, a one-time payment to alleviate a problem, what’s to stop them from applying the same theory to individuals down the road when the government needs more money? Barack Obama is having party after party at the White House. He had another one. Big dinner at the White House last night, 180 members of Congress, his cabinet, wives, spouses, and so forth. I saw the menu. They had dinner in the East Room. One hundred eighty people. Barack said, ‘We gotta put aside the partisanship for a while and we just gotta get together and realize we all have things in common. We have our families and we have our love of country. We just gotta have some social things here.’ So every Wednesday is party day at the White House, either cocktails or, in the case of last night, it was dinner.
He has his kids entertained every week by big-name stars, flies his wife on Air Force One for dinner to Chicago. He gets his workouts in. His top priority is to play bizarre, dirty tricks against us — and when Obama said the Republican lawmakers ought not listen to me, he was participating in a White House dirty trick. It was public deception and a distraction campaign. All the while, the FDIC has banks that are getting killed by assessment fees. The assessment fee is no small deal. The assessment fee could be used in the future against the wealthiest Americans to ‘solve’ the deficit problem.
Now, ever since I started making what I considered to be real money — and I’ll bet this has happened to you, too — you think, ‘Okay, how are they going to take this away from me?’ In my case, preservation of principal has been my sound investment strategery. Just preserve the principal. Don’t take any big risks with it, just preserve it. But I’ve always had this concern, ’cause I know the long arm of government. I have seen it around the world. I’ve seen how tyrannies operate, and in this case, this tyranny is not a violent one. This is a very hard-to-spot one, actually. I’m going to give you some details in a second. But I’ve often wondered, ‘How could they…?’ You know, there’s no wealth tax. There’s an income tax. The income tax is designed to make sure people don’t get wealthy, but those who have money, that’s a big pool of money the government’s going to eventually need.
Because, as I just told you, you people who are 30 and don’t even have kids yet — or even if you do — your kids, your grandkids, they’re broke. They’re broke before they even started their first jobs. They’re broke before they’re born. We are going to be in such debt. We are going to have such high inflation. The government is going to have to get money, and of course… I got a note. I have a friend of mine in Miami, and I got an e-mail from him last night. He was just furious. He found a website that lists the salaries, top 300 salaries and the jobs in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He found that Ft. Lauderdale is paying its police officers $200,000 a year, some of them.
That’s more than the governor makes. Yet these cities, communities, states all say that they can’t cut anywhere. They just can’t — and when there are budget problems, what do they always do? They come out and scare you. ‘We’re going to have to cut the cops. We’re going to have to cut the firemen, going to have to cut sanitation pick up back up to once a week.’ No, no, no, no, no! Don’t do that! So they get away with it. They don’t cut the administrative costs in the governments, state, federal. They don’t get rid of bloated, unnecessary. The federal government is the only thing saving unemployment right now — and it’s not saving it. The federal government’s the only sector that’s growing. They’re hiring people left and right.
So FDIC is about broke, six months it will be insolvent, meaning your bank is not ensured, your money assigned ensured. Citibank is down to less than a buck. General Motors auditors are saying ‘our ability as an ongoing concern is seriously threatened.’ Every entity that has been bailed out by this administration, which is a political solution, is doing worse than before we bailed them out: AIG, Citibank, Citigroup, any entity you want to look at. The only ones that are making out so far are members of the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, who are having their giant, lavish convention with Joe Biden, without media coverage, at the Fontainebleau five-star resort hotel in Miami.
Meanwhile, your deposits may not be insured by the middle of the summer — six months from now, at the most — according to the government itself. We are angering friends. We are disrespecting publicly, we are humiliating publicly our staunchest ally, the United Kingdom. We are close to doing the same thing to Israel by offering $900 million to Hamas in Gaza and promising Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, that we’re gonna pay for him to beef up security in the West Bank. Israel is now in our crosshairs, as well as Iran’s. Folks, it ain’t working. This is not what you who voted for Obama were told; this is not what you expected. You gotta face facts sooner or later. The only viable political solution to these problems now is to stop President Obama and the Democrats from wreaking any more damage to this economy and this country by implementing their ideas.
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RUSH: Let me remind you of one more thing, ladies and gentlemen. What is today? Thursday. On Tuesday in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama was asked about the stock market, and President Obama said he didn’t put a lot of thought into the stock market, that it was more like a tracking poll, that it ebbs and flows, ups and downs, and if you pay attention to tracking polls, you’ll lose sight of the long term and your objectives. Well, it’s not a tracking poll, in the political sense. It’s a real-life tracking poll, and there are no ebbs in it, and there are no flows in it. It is plunging. It is down 212 points today. It is a tracking poll that indicates that people who are willing to invest, which is what results in growth, are unwilling to do so. There is no confidence in the American market right now. But let’s go back to something else President Obama said on Tuesday. President Obama suggested that the time was right for Americans to start investing in the stock market again because profits-to-earning ratios were good now, but you gotta have a long-term view here. Well, there is no such thing as a profit-to-earnings ratio. It’s price-to-earnings ratio. Now, admittedly, I don’t know if it was a rhetorical mistake or if he really doesn’t know. He’s admitted he doesn’t know much about the stock market. Why would he? It’s a citadel of capitalism, and he’s not interested in capitalism, nor are any of the people who have mentored him, who have influenced him or taught him at Harvard or wherever he’s gone to school.
By the way, a little aside here, all of these wizards of smart on Wall Street, and all these wizards of smart from the so-called financial community and the Obama administration, they all come out of the same business schools, and we all know that universities are liberal as hell. What the hell are these business people being taught? These are not the best and brightest. These people are absolute financial idiots, on either side of this. The people running these conglomerates, some of them, the people now in the government trying to fix it, they all come from the same schools. They all come from MIT, Wharton, Harvard, Yale. They all come from the same place. Go look at the pedigrees of all these CEOs. Go look at the pedigrees of all the people in the Obama administration. We know that liberalism exists everywhere else on the campus. Why not the business schools? It has to.
This is unified idiocy. This is unified liberalism applying itself to the free market capitalism of the United States, and you see the results. This is a profundity. I am known for those. They happen frequently on this program. These people are being taught that they can control these magic giant forces of the US market and the capitalistic system because they’re smarter than everybody else. They’re taught that they’re better than everybody else. They’re taught that the people, the average, ordinary common American working and living every day in capitalism is the dolt, is the idiot. Wrong, it’s the other way around. They are the people that make the country work. The people coming out of these business schools and with their pedigrees alone, in many cases with no actual achievements to back up getting their first jobs and climbing the ladder, they’re coming out of these schools thinking they’re smarter than everybody else, that they’re better than everybody else, and everybody else is a bunch of nitwits.
Now they’ve got it. They’ve got their arms around it all. They are doing what they have been taught. And what they’ve been taught is that capitalism is immoral. You wonder why some of these titans of big wealth would vote for a liberal Democrat? We always think that major corporations are made up of people who understand what capitalism is all about and understand the purpose of a corporation. The purpose of a corporation, or business, is not to provide jobs for the community or the United Auto Workers. The number one — and this is Milton Friedman — the number one social responsibility of a US business is to make a profit. One of the most brilliant economic minds in the history of economic minds, Milton Friedman: The number one purpose, sole purpose of a business is to generate profit. It is from profit that everything else flows: new jobs, a vibrant community where the business operates. These clowns coming out of these schools today, just the opposite. The purpose of a corporation is to do liberal things.
So just as I’m concerned, you know, who mentored Obama, we know Jeremiah Wright was one, we know Bill Ayers was one, there’s two people that don’t like capitalism and don’t like the country as it is. These titans of wealth and industry, what the hell did they learn? Same stuff. So there’s an all-out assault here on capitalism. Barack Obama doesn’t know about the stock market because to him the stock market is nothing more than the evil symbol of the exploitative and unfair system known as capitalism. So what did he do on Tuesday? After misrepresenting the price-to-earnings ratio, he then urged people to get in the market. He suggested that Americans start investing in stocks again, wholly inappropriate, perhaps dangerous, ’cause he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and here we are down over 200 points. If you followed Obama’s advice on Tuesday, I sure as hell hope you invested in Walmart, but if you follow Obama, I doubt that you did that.
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RUSH: Let’s start with Mike in Aspen. It’s great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos from the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I called you a while ago and, um, um, tried to convince you that labor unions were a good thing, and ummm, and since then I’ve changed my mind, and I humbly apologize about that fact, and because reading before the holidays what companies are actually making money at the time were ones that didn’t have unions. And now with this union conference in Florida with Vice President Biden being down there — which to me is a joke, I think, having him down there as a speaker. I am just disappointed with all that, and I hope that they don’t get what they want, especially with closed doors and no press media to, you know, talk about what’s going on. I’m concerned about it, so…
RUSH: What was it you thought was great about unions at the time you called me to be critical?
CALLER: Well, because, you know, at the beginning I thought that it was a good thing to have some kind of structure and pay scale and insurance for people. But, you know, you can do that why any job that you want to get. You can, you know, just — you know, promote yourself as a-hardworking person and see, you know, what kind of benefits and things you can get.
RUSH: Yeah, but you see, that’s not the purpose of a union anymore.
CALLER: Yeah?
RUSH: The purpose of a union is not a pay structure and to get benefits and so forth. It is, but the real purpose of a union is to elect Democrat candidates to every office possible. The real purpose of a union is to collect dues —
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: — dues that will then be donated to various Democrats, regardless — regardless — what they stand for. Just flood the elected offices of the country with Democrats. That’s the purpose of unions today. Pure and simple.
CALLER: I just felt that, you know, after listening to you and watching what was happening with the economy, I thought, ‘You know, he does have points,’ and so we… You know, I’ve listened to you more and even my wife’s, you know, had change of heart as far as her viewpoints of the party that she thought was, you know, trying to help out and even she’s just dumbfounded with everything that’s happened.
RUSH: Well, welcome home! Welcome home. We are ecstatic. We’re all ecstatic to have you and your wife back home with us here.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: Mike, thanks much. Jeff in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Hi, and welcome to the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Good afternoon. Mega dittos, first-time caller. I wanted to comment on the Reaganesque, trickle-down economy — economics of the Obama plan. And that my credit card company sent me a thing notifying me that because of the extraordinary changes in the economic environment, they’re upping my credit limit. Or not credit limit, but my — my interest rates across the board about 8%.
RUSH: To what?
CALLER: The APR of 17.9, with a default APR of 29.4.
RUSH: All right. They’re trying to send you a message. You have two interest rates, basically 18 and 25%.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: If you default on the 25% interest rate, just the normal monthly interest rate is 18%, roughly. Right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They’re trying to send you a message: ‘Don’t use our card!’
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: ‘If you must use our card, pay the balance in full.’ They have so many delinquent credit card holders at these banks right now that they don’t want any more. American Express finally has some options where you don’t have to pay in 30 days, but most American Express cards you gotta pay in 30 days, but they’ve just sent letters to three or four hundred credit card holders asking them to tear up the card, don’t use it anymore. And American Express charges a little higher fee to the retail outlets than MasterCard, Visa, some of the others, but they’re really telling you don’t use it. That’s it.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: It’s like the airlines raising the price, the first class ticket from Newark to Washington to 2,000 bucks. They’re saying, ‘Take the train.’ (interruption) It didn’t happen, Snerdley. I’m saying if they did, it’s like saying, ‘Take the train.’
CALLER: Right. And, you know, I feel sorry for the people that won’t be able to pay off — ’cause there’s like a two-month grace period before this hits, and I feel sorry for the people that aren’t going to be able to pay their balances off or, you know, choose to keep the card. Because, you know, increased interest rates are just going to cause people to not spend their money, you know, as freely as they ordinarily would.
RUSH: That’s already happened. People are starting to hoard their money —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — rather than spend it. All of these things are predictable in an economic downturn. There’s nothing fair about an 18% interest rate, but they can do it. I mean, you have the card. You agreed to the deal when you first got the card. They can raise the rates. If you read the 25,000 pages of small print that they send you when you get the card, you will find somewhere in there that they can do this, and you have agreed to it by agreeing to accept the card. It is a shame that people are not going to be able to pay off their balances in a couple of months. They’re going to get saddled with this, but that’s the Obama economy. See, this shouldn’t be happening. We bailed out the banks.
This is my point at the beginning of the program. We bailed out the banks months ago, half a year ago. We’ve already ‘stimulusated’ the banks. They should be coming back. We stimulusated General Motors and Chrysler. They should be roaring back to life! But every entity that we have stimulusated is falling by the wayside and getting worse. At some point people are going to have to recognize here that the political solutions, particularly those of liberals, are destructive. They’re not working. They aren’t working. And I doubt that their purpose is to work as you think they are to work. See, I believe the Obama team is looking at this and (rubbing hands) they’re rubbing their hands together in the White House, this is just what we want.
The ballerina, Rahm Emanuel: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. They’ve got their crisis. It’s getting worse. Look at what they’re doing with the crisis. Now here comes the health care, the health care summit today, ramming brand-new tax increases on top of everything else. Do you know what would stop the market slide, if he really wanted to? See, this is elementary. If he were to announce today a moratorium on the corporate tax and the capital gains tax, bammo! You know something else? I’ll give you a little interesting statistic. This little statistic will blow your mind. The Obama stimulate ’em package was about $1 trillion — $1 trillion to stimulate ’em out there, with the infrastructure and all that.
We haven’t even gotten to that bridge yet. We’ve just seen pictures of what we’re going to stimulate with the bridge. We haven’t even started yet. Now, that he was supposed to cause economic recovery, new jobs, all these great things, right? $1 trillion. Do you know…? Now, let me set this up. See, to me, this statistic — when you learn what I’m going to tell you, this statistic alone — illustrates the real purpose of the Obama agenda. $1 trillion in stimulus. We are spending a trillion dollars we don’t have. We gotta print it; we gotta borrow it. Do you know that if we announced a one-year moratorium on all income taxes, it would cost the government $1 trillion?
So let’s put these things side by side. You put a trillion dollars back in the hands of taxpayers. Don’t send it to Washington. Just leave it. Pay them the gross, pay every American the gross for a year. Don’t print any money on the other side, and don’t distribute it to cities and states and fellow Democrat politicians. Just… If the government’s going to be out a trillion, either way, leave the trillion in the back pocket of taxpayers, and you watch what happens. Watch what happens when people get paid the gross for a year. You want to talk stimulation? You want to talk economic growth? The problem with that is that people that don’t pay taxes wouldn’t get anything, and that’s who Obama wants to get your money.
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RUSH: To the phones! New Haven, Connecticut. Thad, it’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: I’m fine. Thank you very much. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: What really upsets me is the Democrats go around and around and say the lack of regulation in the housing industry over the last eight years of Bush resulted in what we have now. And the fact of the matter is, they started forcing banks. Without 20% down, anybody could buy a house, which artificially inflated the demand curve. House prices went up, and —
RUSH: It was worse than that.
CALLER: — and the dismal science of economics —
RUSH: Thad?
CALLER: — takes so long for things to hit —
RUSH: Thad, it’s worse than that. Not only were they allowed in with no down payment. They were practically dragged into these lending offices and said, ‘Here, you can get a home,’ and they knew they couldn’t qualify. The lenders knew they couldn’t qualify.
CALLER: ACORN is picketing banks.
RUSH: Both sides were forced to make the deal by the government or its agents — right ACORN.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And — the George Bush administration tried to regulate and reregulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
CALLER: And Barney Frank and Chris Dodd stood in his way.
RUSH: Absolutely.
CALLER: They said everything was just fine.
RUSH: Exactly right.
CALLER: And what’s really upsetting though is, it’s like the invisible hand takes it out of somebody else’s pocket — and right now is taking it out of the housing market.
RUSH: Well, I’m going to tell you what.
CALLER: Prices have to go down because they — and now they’re talking about artificially inflating the price level?
RUSH: You haven’t heard the worst of it.
CALLER: They’re crazy.
RUSH: Ohhhhh, they’re crazy like foxes.
CALLER: Well, it’s like it should be mandated: No politician can become a politician unless they have a degree in economics, so they don’t try to pull this stuff.
RUSH: Well, no! Everybody in Obama’s team has got a degree from economics from a wrong-headed liberal business school. You need a degree in life. You need a degree in hard knocks! A degree in working in your own business is what you need, and that’s what’s absent in the Obama administration. It’s nothing but a bunch of academics, graduates of academies, and a bunch of theoreticians. But it’s worse than what you said. To understand this, Thad, to understand what’s going on: Liberals believe that the wealthy and the achievers of this country got that way by taking unfairly from the middle class, the poor, and so forth and so on. What Obama is about, what Barney Frank is about with this affordable housing, is returning wealth to its, quote, unquote, ‘rightful owners.’ They hate the rich. They think the rich have stolen, cheated, and otherwise ill-gotten their money. They provided the details yesterday of Obama’s mortgage bailout. Even if you are struggling to pay your mortgage and you are doing so, we now learn you are going to be bailing out second mortgages — second liens, as well as first liens — even if the people built a swimming pool or an addition to the house. Whatever the reason, you’re going to be bailing out second mortgages as well.